George Kimball/America at Large: Mike Tyson might be a convicted rapist and mugger who in the past half dozen years has punched a referee and bitten at least two opponents, but he isn't even the most despicable character in his own camp.Lewis is. And we're not talking Lennox here.

The run-up to Saturday night's fight at the Pyramid in Memphis took an ugly turn on Monday when Carlos (Panama) Lewis turned up in Tyson's training camp, ostensibly at the invitation of the challenger. If the mention of this Lewis' name rings a bell, then you're dating yourself. Suffice it to say that for all his transgressions, Mike Tyson still found a jurisdiction willing to issue him a boxing licence.

What does that say about Panama Lewis, who has been permanently banned from the sport throughout the world for nearly two decades? A fringe player on the boxing stage a quarter-century ago, Lewis first came to prominence working the corners of world champions Roberto Duran, Vito Antuofermo, and Aaron Pryor. During a rough patch in Pryor's epic, 1982 fight against Alexis Arguello, the television cameras caught Lewis admonishing a cornerman who attempted to give the boxer a swig from the water bottle.

"No, not that one, give him the special bottle, the one I mixed myself," Lewis was heard to say. After partaking of the "special" mixture, Pryor went on to stop Arguello. By the time the word got around and the authorities viewed the videotape, the evidence had disappeared.

That wasn't what got Panama kicked out of boxing, though. That came in a comparatively minor undercard fight between Luis Resto and Irish Billy Collins, a supporting act on the night in 1983 when Duran beat Davey Moore to claim his third world title.

Collins, a youngster from Tennessee who brought an undefeated record and a promising career to Madison Square Garden that night, absorbed a fearful beating from the light-punching Resto, under circumstances so suspicious that the New York State Athletic Commission, at the behest of Collins' father and trainer, impounded Resto's gloves.

Laboratory testing conclusively proved that the gloves had been tampered with. Three- quarters of the horsehide padding had been squeezed out through a small perforation on the side, meaning that Resto might as well have been using a blackjack on Collins' face.

Collins was badly disfigured. He came out of the fight with two fractured orbital bones and his career was ended. In his despair, he had within a matter of months abandoned his wife and baby son, taken to drink, and eventually he drove his car into a cliff. Officially it was termed an accident. His father said it might as well have been suicide, but also pointed out that his son had died, for all intents and purposes, that night in the ring.

THEY couldn't charge Panama Lewis with murder, but both he and Resto eventually stood trial and were convicted of conspiring to fix the outcome of a sporting event. Resto was never allowed to box again. Lewis did less than a year of a five-year prison sentence, but he was permanently exiled from the sport, and remains persona non grata to this day.

This hasn't kept him out of the gyms, where his shadowy and mysterious presence is beyond the jurisdictions of most boxing commissions.

He has continued to "advise" and "motivate" boxers from afar, and sometimes, from very near, serving as a de facto cornerman, shouting instructions from a ringside seat. When one of his charges, Francois Botha, fought Tyson, the Nevada Commission did its best to disrupt communication by ordering Panama removed from his ringside seat and placed well back in the audience.

Now he has emerged from the shadows as an "adviser" to Tyson here in Memphis, and apparently he has Iron Mike's ear. If Ronnie Shields, the respected trainer who took over the duties after Tyson split with Tommy Brooks, had an ounce of self-respect he would have quit this week, but the trainer's share of Tyson's $17.5 million purse is apparently too compelling.

When Shields agreed to train Tyson it was with two stipulations: first, that he would be in charge, with no second-guessing; and second, that Tyson purge his gym sessions of all the leeches, sycophants, and hangers-on who had been cluttering up the scene for years.

The most prominent leech exiled under this edict was the loathsome Steve (Crocodile) Fitch, the self-proclaimed "motivator" who envisions himself the 21st century version of Bundini Brown to Tyson's Ali. So far as anyone has ever been able to determine, the gravel- voiced Crocodile's function is to strut about the gym, dressed in combat boots and desert camouflage, periodically bellowing "gorilla warfare!".

Nobody else missed him much, but apparently Tyson did. After setting up shop at a fitness centre in nearby Cordova last week, Tyson remarked that it was entirely too quiet and asked someone to phone up Fitch. Now not only is Crocodile back, so is Panama Lewis.

Tyson missed a scheduled press conference in Tunica on Tuesday, but did show up at a local hotel gym long enough to hit the speed bag for 10 or 15 minutes before disappearing and leaving the press in the hands of Shields and his assistant, Stacey McKinley.

"I want him to break ribs and break jaws," McKinley told reporters. "I want them to take Lennox Lewis out on a stretcher." It turned out later that Tyson left early because of a bomb scare at the hotel.

Shields and McKinley were apparently asked to keep the press (which had been locked, en masse, inside the gym) busy while the constabulary investigated.

After listening to Shields and McKinley (and Crocodile) for half an hour, Michael (Wolf Man) Katz, the dean of American boxing writers, was moved to conclude: "I'd rather have been bombed."